On Wed, 5 May 2004, Frank Atanassow wrote:
Frankly, I think it's completely unrealistic to expect to be able to fairly evaluate Haskell in 32 hours. As you noted yourself, Scheme and Erlang, being strict, are much closer to conventional programming languages than Haskell is, so it's easier to transfer skills to them.
Yeah, I'm starting to see the difficulty in recommending a language I can barely dabble in up the chain (not as bad as pointy hair bosses, but still not computer scientists).
Furthermore, they're untyped, and learning how to exploit Haskell's static typing is one of the bigger hurdles to learning how to exploit Haskell.
That was one of the things that attracted me to Haskell...the type system. I enjoyed strong typing in ML when I played with it in college.
At best, I imagine you'll come away curious and hungry for more; but clearly that doesn't suffice for a "language evaluation".
Certainly.
Of course, the fact that Haskell can't be grasped in a day (or week) can be construed as a practical argument against its adoption. On the other hand, if you accept that there's no such thing as a free lunch, you might consider that a merit; what is the point of adopting a new language if it doesn't change the way you think about programming, and let you write old programs in new, perhaps better, ways? [1]
This is the crux of the argument. I don't understand how we can make good programming languages more popular. My son was born just a couple of weeks ago, and I barely have enough time now to keep up with anything in my career/field; I was lucky I convinced my management to let me do a (too-) brief language survey. But without having "thought" in Haskell for at least a couple of months, how can I hope to promote it successfully? How can I get a couple of months proficiency in Haskell unless I've promoted it successfully? (Co-routines? =)
While Haskell is IMO the best programming language around, and I want to encourage its broader adoption, if you want a well-designed language with good implementation and support which permits swifter skill transfer, may I (strongly) recommend you add Objective Caml to your list of candidates? Once you acquire some experience with an ML-like language such as OCaml, which after all resembles Haskell in many ways, you will, I believe, find yourself better equipped to evaluate Haskell.
Thanks for this...I actually just added ocaml to my list last night. I was looking over the "programming languages shootout" and read some of the source. It looks pretty neat. I spent last night writing a simple object system from scratch in Scheme with macros, and starting thinking about all the things I'd have to do to implement any kind of type safety, and it just sort of clicked that ocaml might be an interesting solution. Thanks again for your comments (and everyone's). -- Mike J. Bell This is all just my opinion. "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside it's too dark to read." mikeb@manor.org